Chapter 5: The Irish Question/ The Loaded Weapon (170-208)

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Chapter 5The Irish Question/The Loaded Weapon
(170-208)

• A PowerPoint by
• Don L. F. Nilsen

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Irish Humor

• Since Irish humor developed out of the oral
  tradition (the telling of jokes and stories in
  Irish pubs), it is very epiphenal in nature.
• Like Jewish humor, Irish humor developed out of
  pain and tragedy that came from the Irish
  diaspora.
• Irish humor, like Jewish humor, contains much
  wordplay, and like Jewish humor, much of Irish
  wordplay is bilingual and/or bicultural, relating
  to both the Gaelic/Celtic and to the English
  language and culture.
• There are many Irish people around the world who
  are trying to reestablish their roots, and it is
  the humor in Irish written and oral literature
  that is helping them do so. (Nilsen xv)

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Irish Logic

• The Ballyhough railway station had two clocks
  that disagreed with each other by six minutes.
• An irate traveller asked a porter what was the
  use of having two clocks if they didnt tell the
  same time.
• The porter replied, And what would we be wanting
  with two clocks if they told the same
  time? (McCrum 170)
• Based on this story, Martin Joos wrote a
  monograph entitled, The Five Clocks describing
  the Frozen, Formal, Consultative, Informal, and
  Intimate registers of language.

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Irish Folklore

• County Mayo in the Gaeltacht is remote from
  tourism.
• There are the remains of prehistoric forests and
  fairy mounds in the peat-bogs.
• People talk of ancestors as if they were
  neighbors, and of three-hundred-year-old events
  as if they happened yesterday.
• (McCrum 177)

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Kissing the Blarney Stone

• To kiss the Blarney stone you must climb to the
  top of Blarney Castle.
• In order to kiss the Blarney stone, the visitor
  has to lie on his back and be lowered head
  downwards over the edge of the wall.
• Someone has to hold onto the ankles of the
  visitor so that they wont slip off the edge of
  the castle.
• Its hard to know whether kissing the stone gives
  someone the gift of elegance,
• Of if the entire process is a bit of the
  blarney.
• (McCrum 172)

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Irish Blarney

• Irishmen have the gift of gab.
• This comes from kissing the Blarney stone at
  Blarney Castle in County Cork.
• It is said that Queen Elizabeth tried to get
  Cormac MacCarthymore (occupier of Blarney Castle
  at the time) to surrender his castle to the
  English.
• He said he would do so, but he kept giving her
  reasons that he couldnt do it yet.
• The queen is said to have exclaimed, Its all
  Blarneyhe says he will do it, but he never means
  to do what he says.
• (McCrum 171)

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An Irish Talker

• Terry Wogan on BBC is an Irish Talker.
• His language is mocking and self-deprecating. He
  plays with words, attacks his superiors, and
  gets his boot in.
• You could accuse him of really saying very
  little, which again is very Irish.
• (McCrum 207)

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Irish words in English

• Banshee (fairy woman) comes from bean (woman)
  and sí (fairy)
• Keening (wailing) comes from caoine (wail)
• Galore (much)
• Brogue (wooden shoe). The Irish were said to
  speak with a shoe in their mouth, hence, their
  Irish Brogue.
• Sheila youse are both Irish words.
• Shenanigan comes from sionnachuighim (I play
  tricks)
• Smithereens comes from smideirin (a small
  fragment)
• Shanty comes from sean-tigh (old house)
• (McCrum 178, 184, 188, 194, 203)

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More Irish Influence

• The Irish use shall for will
• They say seen for saw
• and She is in the school.
• and belave, jine, and applesass instead of
  believe, join, and applesauce.
• And tree airly and dat for three early
  and that
• And the Irish youse is typical in the speech of
  Irish cops in New York and Boston. (McCrum 202)

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Scouse

• Many people from Dublin moved to Liverpool in
  England
• The Irish accent of Liverpool is known as Scouse
  and it has an adenoidal quality and many rising
  inflections.
• Scouse is the dialect of The Beatles.
• (McCrum 205)

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English Royalty in Ireland

• In 1171 Henry II and his Anglo-Norman knights
  landed in Ireland and began the English
  domination of Ireland.
• Anne, Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell James I all
  imposed English rule over Ireland.
• Satirist Alexander Pope wrote
• Here thou, great Anna! Whom three realms obey,
• Dost sometimes counsel takeand sometimes Tea.
• (McCrum 172-173, 181)

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The Battle of the Boyne, 1690

• In 1690, King William III defeated the Roman
  Catholic forces of old Ireland.
• This gave victory to the Orange over the Green.
• After this, the Anglo-Irish ruling class
  developed. It was known as the ascendency.
• The Republicans were not part of the
  ascendency because they believed in the
  Republic of Ireland.
• But the Irish Catholics still use the city name
  of Derry instead of using the protestant name of
  Londonderry, as in the Londonderry Aire.
• (McCrum 174)

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Ireland The Celtic Fringe (McCrum 166/175)
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Irish-English in 1800 (McCrum 170/182)
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Irish as a Receding Language (McCrum 171/183)
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Irish Settlements in the New World

• Newfoundland, Canada (the earliest settlement)
• Barbados, Carribean (Oliver Cromwell used it as
  an internment camp for prisoners taken during his
  battles in Ireland)
• Montserrat, was known as the emerald isle of the
  Caribbean.
• Australia (in 1851, 30 were Irish)
• (McCrum 191-193)

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Australia as an Irish Penal Colony

• One Irish convict girl is said to have served her
  statutory seven years and returned to Dublin.
• But she then committed another crime in order to
  return to Australia at the governments
  expense. (McCrum 193)

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The Irish Potato Famine

• Potatoes were the staple of the Irish diet, and
  the potato crops failed for several years.
• Hunger and hardship drove the Irish into exile.
  They fled their homes by the millions.
• They went to England, Australia the U.S.

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Irish Diaspora (McCrum (178/190)
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• The Irish children who stayed in Ireland were
  mocked and humiliated if they spoke Gaelic.
• They were punished with wooden gags.
• They were forced to wear weekly tally sticks with
  notches for every Gaelic expression.
• At the end of the week, the schoolmaster would
  tally the notches and administer the appropriate
  punishment. (McCrum 196)

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The Irish Revival

• Today, Gaelic is taught in Irish schools as a
  second language.
• Irish politicians are now expected to use a
  cúpla focal (couple of Gaelic words) to revive
  their Celtic past.
• J. M. Synge, Sean OCasey, James Joyce, W. B.
  Yeats and the Trinity Theatre in Dublin are all
  involved in the Irish revival. (McCrum 197)
• For example, Synges Playboy of the Western
  World, and Joyces The Dead are about the
  revival.

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Synge the Irish Revival

• To make Playboy of the Western World authentic,
  Synge would listen at a chink in the floor of the
  old Wicklow house and eavesdrop on what was being
  said by the servant girls in the kitchen.
• Following is a synopses of the story
• Christy Mahon, A Connaught man, killed his father
  with a blow of a spade, and then fled to an Aran
  island and threw himself on the mercy of the
  natives.

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• Christy was a rogue. Even though a reward was
  offered for his capture, the natives on the
  island hid him in a hole and he was later shipped
  to America.
• But as the play goes on, the audience comes to
  realize that the whole story is a bit of the
  blarney, and the speech of Christy, Pegeen, and
  the Widow Quin become emblematic of Irish
  exaggeration and story telling.
• In fact, Christys father turns out to be alive,
  but the Widow Quin, who is so involved in the
  story, makes out that the father is mad for
  claiming that Christy is his son. (McCrum 199)

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!Irish Authors

• Edmund Spenser (c1554-1599)
• The Faerie Queene
• Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
• Gullivers Travels
• A Modest Proposal
• William Congreve (1670-1729)
• The Way of the World
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
• The Rivals
• Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
• The Importance of Being Earnest
• The Picture of Dorian Gray

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• !!William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
• Treasury of Irish Poetry
• J. M. Synge (1871-1909)
• Playboy of the Western World
• George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
• Pygmalion ? My Fair Lady
• James Joyce (1882-1941)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Ulysses
• The Dubliners
• Finnegans Wake
• Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
• Waiting for Godot
• Flannery OConnor (1925-1964)
• A Good Man is Hard to Find
• (McCrum 170, 179, 200)

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!!!James Joyce

• The character Shem in Finnegans Wake takes the
  English language and smashes it up into
  smithereens, and hands it back and says This is
  our revenge. Shem boasts that he will
• wipe alley english spooker, or
  multiphoniaksically spuking off the face of the
  erse.
• James Joyce remarked that if Dublin were ever
  destroyed, it could be recreated from the pages
  of his fiction.
• (McCrum 200-201)

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Works Cited

• McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil.
  The Story of English. New York, NY Penguin,
  1986. (source of map citations)
• McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil.
  The Story of English Third Revised Edition. New
  York, NY Penguin, 2003. (source of text
  citations)
• Nilsen, Don L. F. Humor in Irish Literature A
  Reference Guide. Westport, CT Greenwood Press,
  1996.